Comment by madrox
11 hours ago
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
I think one of the reasons we gave Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to kids was because it was a story easy to relate to without the gymnastics of interpretation like we'd do with Odyssey or Illiad. I could read Hamlet and understand it as a teenager, but I didn't feel like I had anything in common with him. I wonder if the same thing is happening with Tom.
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
Harry Potter was published before 2000, and is upped by Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci in every way.
I'd rather have one of the Baginses (not the Sackville mind you)
What book by Jones would you recommend starting with?
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I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
Times change but people don't.
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
Sure, the plot devices might be rendered moot by technological change but the underlying motivations remain the same.
Technology has changed, but humans haven’t.
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I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.
> I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
...what do you think will cause kids to be unable to understand it? They understand things like the Odyssey and the Iliad, Charles Dickens, the Bible/Torah/Quran/Baghvad Gita/etc., Faust, Don Quixote, etc. all of which were written far earlier